Word: kuiper
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dutch-born Astronomer Gerard Kuiper (rhymes with hyper), head of the University of Chicago's Yerkes and McDonald observatories, thinks the moon was formed at the same time as the earth (5½ billion years ago), but at first it revolved only about 20,000 miles from the earth's surface. Beyond it were a lot of smaller satellites arranged in a disk somewhat like the rings of modern Saturn...
Crunchy Snow. After this climactic event Astronomer Kuiper thinks the moon led an increasingly peaceful life. It picked up the rest of the small satellites, which made the fresh-looking pits on its surface. Cosmic rays and other high-speed particles bombarded its surface, riddling the material with microscopic holes. This beaten-up stuff is only an inch or so thick, says Kuiper, and it is not dust. He thinks it would feel underfoot "like crunchy snow...
Nobel Prizewinner Harold Urey of the University of California at La Jolla, another leading moon authority, agrees with Kuiper about there being lava on much of the moon's surface, but he does not think that it welled out of a molten interior. Instead, he contends, it was formed on the spot by the energy of great meteors that hit the moon and melted both themselves and the local lunar rock. He thinks that the present surface material may be something like sand or gravel...
Radioactive Moon. Russia's Lunik carried an instrument to measure the radioactivity of the moon's surface. Neither Kuiper nor Gold believes that it could have worked at the distance (4,660 miles) at which the Lunik swept past the moon, but they would be grateful for any information that the Russians choose to release. Dr. Kuiper believes that the moon's surface is blazing with radioactivity. On the earth, he says, the thick layer of air is the shielding equivalent of 3 ft. of lead or 33 ft. of water, protects the surface from many kinds...
Probably it has no life at all. Dr. Kuiper thinks that it has no water or free oxygen. Radio waves, which penetrate the murky atmosphere, hint that the temperature of the invisible surface is something like 500° F., which is much too high for the earth's kinds of life. Venus rotates only once in several weeks, making the sunlit side much hotter than the dark side, and causing violent storms that sweep perpetually over its hot, dry deserts...